• • Paul Ryan’s Austerity Agenda Relies on Bad Math, Coding Errors and a ‘Significant Mistake’ 
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Capitalism  |Paul Ryan  | The Budget Committee chairman was never the economic whiz that his fans imagined. Rather, he’s an Ayn Rand-obsessed ideologue who seeks to promote austerity out of a seemingly sincere belief that it is necessary. [....] Ryan is honest, he must admit that his sense of urgency with regard to the debt is misplaced. He can still argue, as an Ayn Rand enthusiast and a Republican partisan, for cuts in federal spending and for a general downsizing of government. But he should at least acknowledge that the argument is based on Rand’s fictional writing, not on economic reality.      View blog reactions

• • The State of the Union Is Best Served by Growth, Not Austerity 
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Paul Ryan  | The great debate in America is not about the “fiscal cliff” or the “debt ceiling” or the “sequester” or whatever other fantasy pops into Paul Ryan’s head when he’s not reading Ayn Rand. [....] Obama does not have to go all-in with the progressives to get the point across. But he should recognize the value of this outline for countering the fiscal fabulism of Ryan and the Ayn Randites who would make America a nasty and brutish place.      View blog reactions

• • • Meet Ron Johnson, the Randiest of the Ayn Rand Republicans 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  |Ron Johnson  | There is ample evidence to suggest that leading Republican members of the House and Senate are a good deal more familiar with the fiction of Ayn Rand than with the self-evident truths of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Abraham Lincoln. [....] But it is now safe to say that no congressional Republican is more in the thrall of Rand than Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson.      View blog reactions

• His Supporters Treated “Atrociously,” Ron Paul Refuses to Back Romney 
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Anyone who has ever read an Ayn Rand novel or George Orwell's 1984 is familiar with the lifeless patterning of the propaganda state, where the big lie is repeated so steadily that it is eventually mistaken for truth. As speaker after speaker on the opening night of the Republican National Convention took their turn at spinning a "We Built It" fantasy -- based not on what President Obama said or intended to say about small business but on an imagining of what might turn the maximum number of voters against the president -- the last shred of dignity that a great American political party might had retained for itself was tossed off.      View blog reactions

• Paul Ryan Covers Romney's Right Flank 
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Until just a few days ago, Ryan was considered an unlikely prospect for the No. 2 spot on the Republican ticket: too rigid in his budgetary obsessions, too whacky in his enthusiasm for Ayn Rand's novels and Austrian economics, too enthusiastic about taking apart Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.      View blog reactions

• • Paul Ryan’s Claim That His Budget Reflects Catholic Justice Teaching Is ‘Nonsense’ 
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Egoism  |Individualism  | [Ryan] took a shot at moral relativism, suggesting that when the pope expresses concern regarding the global financial system he is “talking about the extreme edge of individualism predicated upon moral relativism that produces bad results in society for people and families, and I think that’s the kind of thing he is talking about.” That’s an interesting statement coming from a congressman who frequently mentions his reverence for Ayn Rand, the novelist who set herself up as a high priestess of individualism. It’s also wrong.      View blog reactions

• A Budget For Wall Street Versus A Budget For Main Street 
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Capitalism  |Paul Ryan  | Ryan says he wants to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And in this he is sincere. Like many of his Republican compatriots, the budget commttee chair has collected a lot of campaign contributions from insurance-industry insiders and Wall Street speculators. But there’s more to Ryan than that. As an Ayn Rand–reading critic of government, he’s far more comfortable than most Democrats and Republicans with the idea that “the market” would do a better job of delivering health care and retirement benefits. Unfortunately, Ryan’s route to “saving” those popular programs relies on what looks an awfully lot like the “crony capitalism” he so frequently decries.      View blog reactions

• • A Budget Referendum on Austerity, Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan 
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Paul Ryan  | Ryan, a veteran of more than twenty years on Capitol Hill (as a Congressional aide and then a congressman), knows a good deal about economics, and a good deal about politics. And he is right when he suggests that his budget is forcing a choice. But which choice? Catholics United, the national Catholic social tradition advocacy organization, suggested Tuesday that another choice is playing out. Noting Ryan’s oft-expressed admiration for objectivist author Ayn Rand, the group declared: “Paul Ryan’s 2013 Budget Reflects the Teachings of Ayn Rand, Not Jesus Christ.”      View blog reactions

• • “Idolizer of the Market”: Paul Ryan Can’t Quite Hear Catholic Church’s Call for Economic Justice 
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Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Amusingly, the congressman [...] took a shot at moral relativism, suggesting that when the pope expresses concern regarding the global financial system he is “talking about the extreme edge of individualism predicated upon moral relativism that produces bad results in society for people and families, and I think that’s the kind of thing he is talking about.” That’s an interesting statement coming from a congressman who frequently mentions his reverence for Ayn Rand, the novelist who set herself up as a high priestess of individualism. It’s also wrong.      View blog reactions

• • Paul Ryan’s authoritarian freakout 
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Paul Ryan  | Paul Ryan claims to be a huge fan of novelist Ayn Rand, the libertarian favorite whose books and essays celebrated bold and unexpected acts of rebellion against autocrats and authoritarians. The House Budget Committee chair positions himself as such a Randifarian that he requires his staff to read the Russian immigrant’s objectivist tracks. But, while Rand at her best celebrated creative dissent, Ryan’s got a big problem with it—a big-government problem.      View blog reactions

• • Meet the GOP’s young guns: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Paul Ryan  | [Paul Ryan] is resolutely polite, certain without being overbearing, confident at the debate podium and, to a greater extent than any prominent Republican of the past two decades, Reaganesque. Unfortunately, he has something else in common with the fortieth president: an approach to budget issues that owes more to Ayn Rand’s paranoid fears about making even the most minimal civic demands on “productive” elites than to facts, figures or economic realism. Ryan’s devotion to Rand, the author of dystopian novels like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and a favorite of the Tea Party movement’s Glenn Beck wing, is fanatical. He requires Congressional staffers to read Rand’s books and heaps praise on the prophetess of selfishness in YouTube videos that even fellow Republicans quietly acknowledge are unsettling.      View blog reactions

• • • Why Ayn Rand wouldn’t back Ron Johnson 
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Anthem  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | [Ron] Johnson takes his Rand seriously. She’s, like, “foundational.” I get that. When I was in Mrs. Coder’s sixth-grade class, we got to order eight paperback books as part of a reading promotion. I went for lots of history, some Orwell and Thoreau and Rand’s novella “Anthem.” I remember reading “Anthem” at my grandmother’s house on Yahara Place and being reasonably impressed. So I read “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” Like any self-respecting sixth-grader, I certainly thought of myself as a misunderstood individual. But I grew out of it.      View blog reactions

• Bernie Sanders fights to block Bernanke confirmation 
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Capitalism  | Bernanke was, and is, the face of everything that is wrong with the crony-capitalism model of "regulation" developed by the Fed under its previous chair, Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan.      View blog reactions

• Election matters: Kerry says it’s too early for Dems to declare win in Wisconsin 
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Response to a newsletter article by state Representative Frank Lasee.
Why is Lasee dispatching columns [...] that suggest some kind of connection between communist theorist Karl Marx and liberalism and libertarian writer Ayn Rand and conservatism? Doesn't he recognize the difference between socialism and liberalism? Between libertarianism and conservatism?      View blog reactions